{"id":1032,"date":"2017-07-25T18:01:30","date_gmt":"2017-07-26T01:01:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/?p=1032"},"modified":"2017-07-25T18:01:30","modified_gmt":"2017-07-26T01:01:30","slug":"retirement-week-2-driven-to-write-about-boyle-heights-protests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/?p=1032","title":{"rendered":"Retirement, Week 2: Driven to write about Boyle Heights protests"},"content":{"rendered":"

This isn\u2019t going so well.\u00a0 I am having news withdrawal symptoms.\u00a0 I look at some of the Twitter feed and the email subscriptions I get every day and think them boring.\u00a0 But my fingers want to be on a keyboard, and there are ideas out there that need exploring.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been fascinated by the Boyle Heights gentrification protests, particularly the specter of people in masks, more fashionista than Zapatista I think, protesting a coffee bar where one of the owners is white.<\/p>\n

L.A. Times <\/i>columnist Steve Lopez<\/a> visited as the employees were sweeping up broken glass from vandalism.\u00a0 Silly, he said.\u00a0 The owners report that the protests are attracting\u00a0 business<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Boyle Heights, a neighborhood just east of downtown Los Angeles, has always been a neighborhood in transition.\u00a0 It was the site of one of the first Jewish settlements in Los Angeles, and the Breed Street Shul<\/a> built in 1923 still stands, although the Jewish vanguard decamped to Fairfax Avenue and points west many decades ago.<\/p>\n

Remnants of a Japanese community are still visible: some very old settlers, a large temple, and a cemetery.<\/p>\n

These days, diversity largely means mixing waves of Latino immigrants.<\/p>\n

Press accounts call this \u201cvibrant,\u201d and I suppose it is.\u00a0 Unlike many older suburban areas, there were not many vacant storefronts on Cesar Chavaz (formerly Brooklyn Avenue) even when I worked in Boyle Heights 15 years ago.\u00a0 There were people on the streets, and walking from the Breed Street School down to 3rd<\/sup> Street took you past front yards where chickens were pecking at the earth oblivious of their in-the-pot fate.<\/p>\n

But there was also a lot of violence.\u00a0 After an evening meeting, it was possible to hear the pop-pop-pop of gunfire as one walked to the car.\u00a0 A reforming gang member was killed in a revenge shooting at the Smart & Final across from the school, one of the scores of Father Boyle\u2019s Homeboys he has buried.<\/p>\n

TV journalist John Merrow came to town to do a story on what he termed a gang-prevention program called the Society of Students.\u00a0 (SOS was really much more a build resilience program, and I\u2019m sorry that it hasn\u2019t spread.)\u00a0 Merrow remarked that the neighborhood looked kinda nice, not like the slums in older eastern cities, and he wondered what the big deal was about violence.\u00a0 I told him to ask the kids to demonstrate the pancake drill.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Elementary students at Breed were taught, \u201cwhen you hear gunfire, make yourself a pancake on the ground.\u201d\u00a0 The students demonstrated.\u00a0 Merrow was amazed.<\/p>\n

The point of this is: let\u2019s not romanticize Boyle Heights or other places that are in the process of gentrification.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not like anyone with a half a foresight couldn\u2019t see it coming.\u00a0 Stand on a patch of land with a clear view to the west, and rapidly revitalizing downtown is clearly visible.\u00a0 You could work there and walk home.<\/p>\n

There had been a housing boomlet before the crash of \u201908.\u00a0 Now it\u2019s back, with the help of the new light rail Gold Line that connects Boyle Heights and the rest of East L.A. to the city center.\u00a0 Boyle Heights is simply too close to downtown to remain a real estate backwater much longer.<\/p>\n

The question is: Can a rising neighborhood lift the people who are already there, and if so how does it do that?<\/p>\n

This substantive problem comes to rest in schools, classrooms, and what school choice becomes for urban schools.\u00a0 When we were writing about the Annenberg project in Boyle Heights, we started noticing housing transitions and posed the question, \u201cwhat would Roosevelt High School do with 500 professional middle class kids if they showed up at the school house door.\u201d<\/p>\n

People looked at us in disbelief.\u00a0 \u201cWouldn\u2019t happen,\u201d they said.\u00a0 \u201cNo one wants to go to school with poor kids.\u201d\u00a0 But that\u2019s exactly the problem will face Los Angeles schools.\u00a0 If young middle class families move back into the city, where will they school their children?\u00a0 If LAUSD builds itself around only being the educator of last resort for poor kids\u2014the \u201cchooser\u201d kids having left for the charters\u2014then it creates class segregation for itself and its students.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This isn\u2019t going so well.\u00a0 I am having news withdrawal symptoms.\u00a0 I look at some of the Twitter feed and the email subscriptions I get every day and think them boring.\u00a0 But my fingers want to be on a keyboard, and there are ideas out there that need exploring. I\u2019ve been fascinated by the Boyle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[143,98,184],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1033,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions\/1033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}